Israel helps India clean up the Ganges river

It has been 26 years since India embarked on a lofty plan to restore the heavily polluted Ganges river. But the project has seen many setbacks. Now, with fresh cash from the World Bank, the river might make a recovery.
On its journey south and east from the Western Himalayas, through the Gangetic Plain of North India and on to the Bay of Bengal, the Ganges flows for over 2,500 kilometers (1,553 miles). More than 400 million people dwell in its basin and depend on its life source. It's one of the world's 20 largest rivers - and also one of the most polluted on the planet.
In places, the once sacred, life-giving Ganges has become a cesspool, polluted with fecal waste, semi-cremated bodies, and water-borne disease.
In its $3 billion (2.4 billion euros) quest to restore the Ganges to health, the Indian government is turning to an unlikely source - Israel - a tiny, arid Middle East country that is producing world-leading water technology.
Israel NewTech, an initiative led by the Israeli Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labour, is matching Israeli clean-tech companies with Indian partners to tender solutions for the Ganges.
The Indian government aims to have no untreated municipal sewage or industrial runoff enter the Ganges by 2020, but according to Oded Distel, head of Israel NewTech, cleaning the Ganges is more like a 20-year mission.
"It's a huge project. It combines technological aspects and elements from waste water treatment and water management up to irrigation," he said. During dry season, "it becomes more a kind of canal for waste water rather than a real living river."

In the past decades, usually when a project is taken up to clean rivers and lakes, a budget gets allocated and folks spend a few years exhausting that budget. At the end of it, the water body is usually filthier! Why? Coz while the effort is focused on cleaning the waters, nothing is done about the drainage from cities and factories that continuously keeps pouring in. Nope, people involved in this are surely not dumb. This process has become such a nice money making venture that nobody wants to fix the problem once and for all. Hopefully, wiser and cleaner minds will prevail this time!

Israeli companies have developed some of the best water treatment/management technologies. To clean up the Ganges, they would require more than technology. Along with technology and cash, give them permission to shoot whosoever they think isn't exactly being helpful in the cause to clean up the river. For sure the river will get cleaned up!